One of Australia's largest hosting providers has bypassed incumbent storage provider IBM and instead picked EMC to deliver 261 terabytes of of storage. The customer's CTO said big factors were EMC's tight three-way alliance with Cisco and VMware and its willingness to extend service coverage from three years to four.From an itnews.com.au article citing customer Melbourne IT's CTO, Glenn Gore:

While VMware and Cisco tend to play down their technology trinity, the VCE (VMware, Cisco, EMC) partnership was top of mind for Gore as a customer. "It was important to see our roadmaps and theirs line up," he said. "We want to move to a highly dense environment.

More Global CIO Insights

White Papers

• How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
• New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows

More >>

Reports

• Research: State of the IT Service Desk
• Research: Federal Government Cloud Computing Survey

More >>

Webcasts

• Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
• The ABC's of Cloud Computing in the Midmarket

More >>

"There is also lot of value to be gained from buying off vendors with a mutual support matrix between them. It stops the finger-pointing between vendors when there is a problem. This is especially important as the grey area between servers, network and storage is blurred further."

The iTnews article said the four new EMC storage units will come fairly close to matching the capacity of the 19 IBM systems currently in place: 261 terabytes of usable capacity in the four EMC SANs versus 330 terabytes 19 IBM SANs.

In addition, customer CTO Gore said he was very impressed by EMC's willingness to add a fourth year of service into the mix:

Gore said EMC has for the first time offered a four-year TCO (total cost of ownership model), an extra year on most other vendors. "We have usually looked at a three-year TCO model, but tried to stretch it out to four or five years if the fifth year is used for migration to a new platform," he said. "The EMC deal packages four years of service life upfront."